The Man Who Made the Novel

Loving and loathing Samuel Richardson.

Richardson was an accidental novelist, and an accidentally great one; his powers of empathy clashed with his pinched piety.

Illustration by Leigh Guldig

It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely novelist than Samuel Richardson. The son of a carpenter, he attended school only intermittently until he was seventeen, when his formal education ended and he was apprenticed to a printer. He didn’t publish his first novel until after he turned fifty. The undertaking was almost accidental. He had become the proprietor of a printing press when, in 1739, two London booksellers asked him to put together a “letter-writer,” an etiquette manual consisting of letters that “country readers” might use as models for their own correspondence.

Richardson quickly expanded the project’s scope. A diligent worker who had risen from tradesman to middle-class property owner, he longed to impart what he had learned. He wanted, he wrote in the book’s introduction, to teach readers not only how to write elegant letters but “how to think and act justly and prudently in the common concerns of life.” Recollecting a true story he’d heard years earlier, he composed several letters to and from a pious servant girl whose boss was making lewd advances, in order to warn young women of “snares that might be laid against their virtue.”

In the fall of 1739, Richardson began to absent himself from his wife in the evenings, after work at the printing press. Instead of proceeding as planned on the letter-writer, he was quietly adding to the stock of letters by the servant girl, bringing her story to a happy conclusion. It took him just two months to produce “Pamela,” a book many consider the first modern English novel.

Not that Richardson made this claim. He associated novels with improbable romances, or mere entertainments; “Pamela” was intended to be instructive. But a novel it was. More than the adventure stories of Daniel Defoe or Jonathan Swift, “Pamela” was concerned with the representation of interior life. It is also organized around a single, unified plot, which distinguished it from Defoe’s more episodic “Moll Flanders” (1722), a pseudo-memoir that recounts its protagonist’s varied and largely illicit pursuits, from her inauspicious beginnings through her late years in the colonies. Flanders’s story is told from the complacent perspective of a woman who has achieved wealth and security, and generally adopts the matter-of-fact tone of a case history. Pamela’s letters, in contrast, are lively and conversational, their language a reflection of both her native cleverness and her inexperience. Richardson was fond of saying that his characters’ letters are written “to the moment”; that is, as the characters experience the events they describe. This lends “Pamela” a palpable sense of immediacy. In its first letter, our fifteen-year-old heroine describes to her parents the attention she has begun to receive from her young, unmarried employer—who “gave me with his own hand four golden guineas, and some silver.” Her parents urge Pamela to keep her distance. “We had rather see you all covered with rags, and even follow you to the churchyard, than have it said, a child of ours preferred any worldly conveniences to her virtue,” they write—to which Pamela responds, “I will die a thousand deaths, rather than be dishonest in any way.”

This can sound like the exaggerated language of farce. It isn’t. To read Richardson is to enter a moral universe in which the terms “virtue” and “honesty” are used, unironically, as synonyms for virginity. Richardson’s puritanism was extreme even for his period. (Flanders, for example, spoke playfully about her virginity as a “trifle . . . to be had” easily.) But the sanctimonious tone didn’t deter many readers. The novel was so popular that “Pamela”-inspired merchandise, from teacups to fans, quickly sprang up, as did spurious sequels, a theatrical version, and even a comic opera. The book also drew praise for its edifying story line. (“Virtue Rewarded” is its apt subtitle.) Alexander Pope gave it a jolt of publicity when he said that it would “do more good than many volumes of sermons,” a quote that may have been solicited by Richardson’s brother-in-law, a bookseller.

Not everyone was won over by the self-taught moralist. A number of “Pamela” parodies also appeared, including two by a not yet famous Henry Fielding, then a thirty-four-year-old failed playwright studying to be a lawyer. Fielding, whose Tom Jones would gain renown for his cheerful sexual exploits, found Richardson’s platitudinous Sunday-school morality unbearable. He launched his own novel-writing career with the spoofs “Shamela,” in which the virginal young maid is recast as a slatternly schemer who manipulates Squire Booby into marrying her, and “Joseph Andrews,” which purported to be about Pamela’s brother. Strapping young Joseph’s impassioned speeches about his virtue, though nearly identical in substance to Pamela’s, read rather more comically coming from a man’s mouth.

Fielding articulated a squeamishness about Richardson that outlasted either man’s lifetime. Though Richardson went on to write two more novels—including the masterly “Clarissa”—he has long inspired an unusually intense mix of appreciation and irritation. “So oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent,” Samuel Coleridge described him in his notebooks. It pained Coleridge to admit that he nonetheless admired the man “very greatly.” A self-satisfied bourgeois, with a scold’s horror of impropriety, Richardson certainly confounds the image of the writer as tortured artist. The bigger problem is that these qualities bleed into his work. His self-serious moralizing and the ostentatiousness of his characters’ rectitude make Richardson difficult to embrace. Yet, unlike the more urbane and congenial Fielding, Richardson has a knack for psychological realism and an ability to craft characters whose clamorous inner lives continue, almost three centuries later, to feel real to us. He possesses a sometimes dizzying rhetorical intelligence—his characters argue with the agility of top litigators—and seemingly boundless imaginative sympathy: the figures who populate the most winning of eighteenth-century picaresques are cardboard cutouts compared with Richardson’s principals.

Even “Pamela,” prudish and didactic as it is, feels far less limited or quaint than we might expect. The story is robust enough that readers needn’t accept Pamela’s belief that she’ll be “ruined” if she has sex (consensual or otherwise) in order to sympathize with her situation; it’s enough that she doesn’t want sex on the terms offered. It helps, too, that her narration is engaging and tartly comic. If Mr. B, her employer, had his way, she writes to her parents, he “would, keep me till I was undone, and till his mind changed; for even wicked men, I have read, soon grow weary of wickedness with the same person.” Meanwhile, Mr. B—“the finest young gentleman in five counties”—assumed that what he wanted from Pamela would not be so very unwelcome, especially since, like any decent “gentleman of pleasure,” he was prepared to reward her for her favors. He is baffled by her reaction to his overtures—somewhat understandably, given that Pamela says things like “How happy am I, to be turned out of door, with that sweet companion my innocence!” (In spite of being on Pamela’s side, we can’t help feeling some sympathy with Mr. B when he calls her a “romantic idiot.”) Even as his actions become increasingly desperate, he has a coherent rationale for his behavior. He thinks Pamela is overreacting. “I am sure you . . . frightened me, by your hideous squalling, as much as I could frighten you,” he says after he tries to kiss her.

Richardson’s wit and ability to conceive characters who feel “natural”—as he rather immodestly put it in the book’s original introduction—enable the novel to outpace his own didactic intentions, to become something far more lifelike and original than a morality tale. But “Pamela” is, at bottom, a Cinderella story, and so Mr. B eventually proposes marriage to his former maid. Pamela is transported with joy that he is willing to “stoop” so low, but what’s good for the character is less good for the reader. With a story to tell, Richardson the writer of instructional material was distracted, but when the conflict is resolved, about halfway through, we enter a narrative dead zone in which the author’s more irksome qualities come to the fore. Mr. B becomes a mouthpiece through which Richardson delivers life lessons (for example, that a woman ought not grow “careless in her dress” after marriage). Lest we forget that Pamela’s happiness is due to her exemplary virtue, we watch as she is embraced, one after another, by all the neighboring gentry as “an ornament to our sex,” “a worthy pattern for all the young ladies in the county,” “the flower of their neighborhood,” etc.—a tedious procession of praise that starts to undermine the good will we felt for Pamela when her circumstances were less prosperous. The novel closes with a last word from our zealous author, who briefly tears off his epistolary robes to list the various moral teachings the book contains, in case we somehow missed them.

“Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter Writing” (Cambridge), a new book by Louise Curran, who teaches at Oxford, looks for fresh insight into this perplexing author and his milieu by scouring his correspondence. The premise is an intriguing one. As the English canon’s best-known writer of epistolary novels, Richardson would seem likely to be a noteworthy letter writer in private life.

It turns out he isn’t. An 1804 piece in the Edinburgh Review that assessed the first published edition of Richardson’s letters had it that “they consist almost entirely of compliments and minute criticisms on his novels, a detail of his ailments and domestic concerns . . . the whole so loaded with gross and reciprocal flattery, as to be ridiculous at the outset, and disgusting in the repetition.” Little unearthed in Curran’s sober, academic study contradicts this characterization. Skeptics of literary biography have long held that everything worth knowing about a novelist is evident in the work itself. Richardson’s correspondence constitutes strong supporting evidence for this proposition.

If, for example, Richardson’s aim in “Pamela,” with the surfeit of overblown compliments bestowed on her, was to guarantee that readers knew exactly what they were supposed to think of his heroine, he also sought by the same method to insure that readers thought highly of the work itself. For the second edition of “Pamela,” as Curran notes, he took the unusual step of including as an introduction twenty-four pages of fawning letters he received about the book. “There was never Sublimity so lastingly felt, as in PAMELA,” reads one, by Richardson’s friend Aaron Hill (one of five from Hill that were included). Not surprisingly, these “greasy compliments,” as one clergyman described them, didn’t go over well with everyone. Fielding took a potshot by beginning “Shamela” with several made-up letters composed in much the same style: “How happy would it be for Mankind, if all other Books were burnt, that we might do nothing but read thee all Day, and dream of thee all Night.”

Richardson’s life might be divided into two phases: before “Pamela” and after. About the former period, relatively little is known—he appears to have destroyed most of his letters from these days. We know he married the daughter of his former employer in 1721, the same year he set up his own printing shop. All six of their children died in infancy or early childhood; his wife died young as well. He was remarried the next year, once again to a woman from a family with whom he had long-standing business ties. Both were sound alliances in a worldly sense, but Richardson appears to have been relatively happy in each of his marriages, although the first was characterized primarily by grief over the loss of so many children. To friends and business associates, including struggling writers, he was frequently generous, more generous than unalloyed prudence or the burgher work ethic that he embodied might lead us to expect. His strict middle-class morality may seem uninspired, but, as his biographers T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel have pointed out, he doesn’t appear to have been petty or hypocritical.

After “Pamela,” the once obscure businessman became conscious of himself as a public figure. He cultivated epistolary relationships with a coterie of admirers, many of whom were women—several, he bragged to a friend, were women “of Condition”—and he began to preserve his correspondence with an eye to future publication. Over the years, this deferential circle of correspondents became his most important sounding board. (After his death, Samuel Johnson quipped that Richardson “died merely for want of change among his flatterers.”) When Aaron Hill, the author of those glowing letters about “Pamela,” delicately suggested ways to shorten “Clarissa,” Richardson responded first defensively and then with what appears to have been aggrieved silence; his favored correspondents presumably learned over time not to repeat Hill’s error. Richardson’s letters, like his heavily internal novels, rarely engaged with events in the outside world or even with books aside from his own. He claimed not to have read “Tom Jones,” although in deriding its “bad Tendency” to members of his set he demonstrated a suspiciously detailed knowledge of its contents. [cartoon id="a19999"]

It’s surprising enough that this touchy, straitlaced, and rather narrow man wrote a novel like “Pamela,” in which he deftly inhabited the turbulent emotional life of a teen-age girl. Even more surprising is the fact that he went on to write “Clarissa.” “Pamela” is, for the first half, a crisp, shrewd delight of a romantic comedy. But “Clarissa” is of a different order. Johnson called it “the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart.” Even Fielding admired it.

Richardson has a habit of putting his heroines in harrowing binds, and “Clarissa” is no exception. At the novel’s outset, eighteen-year-old Clarissa Harlowe’s family is pressuring her to marry for money. The Harlowes believe that, if she doesn’t marry the wealthy but unappealing Solmes, she will run off with the “too-agreeable rake” Lovelace. Clarissa insists that she will give up Lovelace if her parents will let her remain single. It’s a testament to Lovelace’s perceived desirability that absolutely no one seems to feel she will hold up her end of this bargain. A standoff ensues, in which, to prevent her from eloping with the “whoremonger,” her family keeps a close watch over her. Her only outlet is writing long letters to her friend Anna Howe. Their ongoing correspondence is one major portion of “Clarissa.” Another consists of letters between Lovelace and his confidant, Belford.

What separates the novel’s setup from the gothic melodrama that emerged later is how well it’s constructed. Each of the Harlowes has his or her own reasons for wanting Clarissa to marry Solmes; their distinct personalities operate on Clarissa and on one another in a way that’s both operatic and in keeping with how families work. Then, there is Clarissa herself. “So much wit, so much beauty, such a lively manner, and such exceeding quickness and penetration!” Lovelace writes. A more sophisticated model of virtue than Pamela, Clarissa is philosophical in an old-fashioned sense, teasing out maxims about human nature from everyday observation. For her, morality begins with the attempt to remove the taint of self-interest from her judgments. She wouldn’t, she writes to Anna, be pleased with herself “if I should judge of the merits of others as they were kind to me. . . . For is not this to suppose myself ever in the right; and all who do not act as I would have them act, perpetually in the wrong?” If she’s a bit of a Goody Two-Shoes, most of us are, like Lovelace, inclined to forgive her. She’s too fair-minded, too impressive in her repartee, too rigorously self-critical (“Is not vanity, or secret love of praise, a principal motive with me at the bottom?”), and too uniformly kind for us to hold her over-earnestness too much against her.

One of Richardson’s avowed purposes in “Clarissa” was to caution young women against “preferring a Man of Pleasure to a Man of Probity.” This aim would have been achieved had he written Lovelace as a simple villain. But, libertine though he is, Lovelace is also intelligent, full of feeling, and a terrific talker, who amuses even in his offhand remarks, as when he sneeringly describes Belford—who goes in for prostitutes, fallen women, and other easy prey—as “determined . . . to gluttonize on the garbage of other foul feeders.” He is the only character who is Clarissa’s match in wit and the only one, aside from Anna, to fully comprehend her merit. Plus, he’s the best-looking man Clarissa has ever seen, a man whose “bountiful temper and gay heart attach every one to him.” Whether Clarissa is, as her family believes, in love with him is a question that has spurred debate ever since the novel was published. She denies it, but, from Johnson on, the critical consensus has mostly held that she is lying to herself. “There is always something which she prefers to the truth,” Johnson said. I confess I tend to part ways with Johnson et al. on this point. My instinct is to believe Clarissa when she says that she likes Lovelace “better perhaps than I ought to like him,” given “all his preponderating faults,” but that she would happily, and “without a throb,” as she puts it to Anna, give him up in order to be reconciled with her parents and her uncles. Still, she winds up doing exactly what the Harlowes most dread. Afraid that they will force her to marry Solmes and manipulated by a less than wholly truthful Lovelace, she panics and runs off with her dashing admirer.

Here the novel takes a turn. Clarissa and Lovelace seem at first to be, like Pamela and Mr. B, a familiar if well-rendered example of a virtuous woman and a marriage-resistant playboy, but their fully elaborated inner worlds begin to transform them into beings far more ambiguous. Clarissa vacillates between attraction to and moral revulsion toward Lovelace, who is as slippery a character as fiction has produced. At one moment, he laments that he and Clarissa fight so often: “we fall out so often, without falling in once; and a second quarrel so generally happens before a first is made up.” He is so endearing that we almost forget that the cause of their arguments is his endless duplicity, the “dog’s tricks” he almost can’t help but engage in. Of his designs, Clarissa knows less than the reader—who has access to his letters to Belford—but she picks up on things all the same. She writes to Anna:

He says too many fine things of me, and to me. True respect, true value, I think lies not in words. . . . The silent awe, the humble, the doubting eye, and even the hesitating voice, better shew it. . . . The man indeed at times is all upon the ecstatic; one of his phrases. But, to my shame and confusion, I must say, that I know too well to what to attribute his transports. In one word, it is to his triumph.

Clarissa is in a mortifyingly dependent position. She needs Lovelace to marry her for the sake of her reputation. “I behold him with fear now, as conscious of the power my indiscretion has given him over me,” she confesses to Anna. If she knew as much as the reader, she’d be even more afraid. “Clarissa” is one of fiction’s most terrifying “he said, she said” dramas because the facts are seldom what’s at issue: the characters’ private thoughts are. Clarissa would be both furious and humiliated if she knew to what extent Lovelace is torn between his real tenderness for her and his baser impulses.

“Heaven give me the heart to be honest to my Clarissa!” he writes, and means it—at that moment. But even in a position of dependence Clarissa is too truthful, or proud, to cater to Lovelace’s ego or to cease regretting that she left home with him: he is not, she tells him, “a man . . . who improved upon acquaintance.” Whether because his vanity is wounded by this treatment (she is “like a haughty and imperious sovereign,” he complains) or simply because it’s his nature, once Clarissa is in his power he can’t help but pursue the ultimate coup—making this young woman of unusually high repute into his mistress. He now cunningly sidesteps the issue of marriage, concealing his ambivalence in a sea of “lip-deep” promises. He isn’t entirely sure he won’t behave honorably by her—eventually. “I resolve not any way,” he says. “I will see how her will works; and how my will leads me on.” Meanwhile, he prides himself on at least being honest with his chosen confessor. “Never was there . . . a man so ready to accuse himself,” he says to Belford.

When depicting his main characters’ inner turmoil, Richardson moves well beyond his hortatory preoccupations. From one page to the next, it’s never clear which motives will hold sway over Lovelace (“This cursed aversion to wedlock, how it has entangled me!”) or how Clarissa, with her delicate pride and shifting perceptions, will respond to him. Clarissa’s and Lovelace’s letters to their respective confidants are as probing as any therapy session, and as riddled with defensiveness and self-deception. The epistolary form, it becomes evident, plays to Richardson’s strengths and minimizes his weaknesses: writing from the perspectives of his best-realized and most complex characters, and especially writing “to the moment,” filters his didactic intentions, preventing him from sermonizing in his own voice.

Relentlessly analytical and unabashedly prolix—Johnson once said, “If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself”—“Clarissa” is as unlike most of the novels to have come after it as it is from anything written before. No random twists of fate, no plots set in motion by jealous rivals keep the lovers apart; even the disapproving parents have been sidelined. The only obstacles to their happiness are the ones they create themselves. It’s hard to think of a work of fiction so exclusively internal until Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” and harder still to think of a romance. “The finest novel in the English language,” Harold Bloom has said. “The only novel that can rival even Proust.” If most readers aren’t prepared to go quite that far, this dark, strange romantic dance certainly marks the flowering of Richardson’s talent for morally and emotionally sophisticated psychological realism.

One can’t talk about “Clarissa” without acknowledging its most notorious feature: its length. By far the longest novel in the English canon, “Clarissa” runs to some nine hundred and seventy thousand words. For reference, “War and Peace” clocks in at five hundred and sixty thousand words, and “Infinite Jest” a slender four hundred and eighty-four thousand. My Penguin Classics edition—at 1,499 pages—dwarfs the other paperbacks on my shelf, more like a phone book than like a novel.

Even its most ardent admirers tend to concede that some sections are overlong. Richardson anticipated such criticism and included a rebuttal in its postscript: “The letters and conversations, where the story makes the slowest progress are presumed to be characteristic. They give occasion . . . to suggest many interesting personalities, in which a good deal of the instruction essential to a work of this nature is conveyed.” His pedantic, slightly hectoring tone is telling. One wonders if he was arguing with himself—searching for a justification for not having had the wherewithal to take a scalpel to his own work.

But this is less of a problem for “Clarissa” than it would be for his third and last book, “Sir Charles Grandison.” Richardson’s three novels bear an interesting relationship to one another. He had always been uncomfortable with the happy ending he had given “Pamela,” and the resulting implication—remote from his actual view—that “a reformed rake makes the best husband.” (Pamela’s marriage to Mr. B had ostensibly been imposed on him by the true story he remembered and sought to re-create.) “Clarissa” had been intended as something of a correction. With Lovelace, Richardson aimed to introduce a rake so chilling as to set women straight about these kinds of men. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to readers’ response to Milton’s Satan. To his dismay, many readers blamed Clarissa’s coldness for what goes wrong between them. “O that I could not say, that I have met with more admirers of Lovelace than of Clarissa,” he wrote to a friend.

With “Grandison,” he sought to correct the correction, writing about the sort of virtuous man women ought to prefer to a Lovelace. Grandison is handsome, brave, and kind to women and the poor. Unfortunately, he is also an insufferable prig. He is apt to pronounce that there are “innocent delights enough to fill with joy every vacant hour” in order to persuade a friend to give up womanizing—which the friend does. The bulk of the book consists of Grandison delivering life lessons to, and being praised by, his many admirers; what little plot it has concerns a love triangle in which our hero, though blameless—according to his own protestations—winds up entangled with two women, both desperately in love with him. Sadly, only one can marry him. So inconsolable is the one who can’t that our hero has to talk her out of becoming a nun.

With more expansiveness than “Pamela” and less moral and psychological complexity than “Clarissa,” Richardson’s third novel offers a comprehensive distillation of the generally sound and humane worldly wisdom that its author valued. It also contains occasional germs of the subtle drawing-room comedy that in the nineteenth century constituted such a crucial development for the novel. But its sermon-to-action ratio is so high, and its adulation of its self-satisfied hero so breathless, that it often reads as if it were written by one of Richardson’s parodists.

What is surprising is that “Grandison” was, of Richardson’s novels, a particular touchstone for Jane Austen, who (her nephew recounted) could describe with exactitude “all that was ever said or done” by each of its many characters. This partiality, difficult to account for on aesthetic grounds, is likely attributable to a certain overlap in sensibility between the authors, an unembarrassed belief in prudence and scrupulosity over unchecked feeling. Richardson’s crusade against rakish men was one of several themes that Austen would take up in her own fiction, oftentimes more convincingly (as in “Sense and Sensibility”). Working in the early years of domestic realism, she seems to have felt a kinship with its originator, someone who assembled his massive narratives—what he recognized as a “new species of writing”—without models or maps. A little more than half a century after Richardson, she brought to the realist novel a discipline and a concision and an irony that enabled her to transform her own didactic impulses into the basis of art. Richardson, on the other hand, often succeeded despite himself. It was when his instructional aims were crowded out by the tortuous inner lives of his characters that he achieved greatness. ♦

Adelle Waldman is the author of the novel “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.”